Three myths about reporting dashboards

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A few things about reporting dashboards that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

“It only matters for big sites”

A dashboard nobody opens is not a dashboard. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

“Our platform handles it”

Every metric should suggest an action. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Three things worth confirming about reporting dashboards before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Every metric should suggest an action — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.